hiya (for future reference, could you please wrap lines at ~75 cols?) On Sun, Nov 17, 2002 at 10:09:14PM -0500, Sean Proctor wrote: > Does there still exist packages in non-free that more than 10% of debian users have installed? And if so, are those integral parts of their systems? It's not like removing these packages from debian mirrors will suddenly make them unavailable. Users can still go to $SOME_SITE and download them (presumably). If a user doesn't know enough about a piece of software to be able to find and download it, it's probably not that vital to them. > but if you take out support for those non-free packages, when a user installs this software according to the vendor-provided manner, they have no assurance that it's not going to break something on their system, or that it will install things according to the FHS at all. this support for non-free packages as a great service that debian provides. i understand that managing various levels of non-free packages is a less-than-ideal task for dd's, but i hope they realize that it's something that really is appreciated by the end-users. note that i too hope to see a day when non-free simply wanes away from sheer lack of demand, and don't even use it myself. I understand the philosophy behind folks wanting to throw non-free out completely, and agree with most of the reasons. I just think that there's a way to keep the moral high-ground as well as still provide this service to debian users. I think what's being done now with the complete segregation of free and non-free, as well as what i've seen in the few posts i've read (so many big threads! so little time...) about Replaced-By-Free: type fields in the control files for these packages would be great. you could set it up so that the non-free tree were not selected by default during install, and be very vocal about the fact that so-and-so program really isn't that great, but if someone wants a specific program, and we can legally provide it for them without cost beyond the time spent managing the package, then i think we ought to. just my $0.02 anyway --sean
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